"Six Feet Of Earth Makes Us All Equal"
Some long forgotten Italian dude
Today, I got up and decided to be somebody else. It wasn't that hard. I just got sick of looking at myself in the mirror and asking why I hadn't been to the gym for five months knowing full well, I didn't have an answer that was acceptable. I don't fully understand the mechanics of the human brain but I do know this - you can think anything you like and it will be true if you choose to believe it.
Sometimes, you can believe this So Much that it doesn't even matter if the rest of the world falls into line behind your belief. You can create your own hyper-reality and live right inside of it - oblivious to the world turning and burning like Rome because you... YOU, GOD OF ALL YOU SURVEY... are looking forwards. No rear-view mirror necessary so wind down the window and throw it out to be crushed under the wheels of the truck doing 120mph just five feet behind you.
I find this quite appealing but I can't quite bring myself to embrace the place where I'm able to say the rest of the world can go to hell and pretend not to see it. Take a show like Real Housewives Of California which appears to contain people who think their shit is important enough for a TV production company to pay them (repeatedly), who made an entire generation of TV viewers tune in (repeatedly) and inspired a whole raft of other people with stupid ideas for TV shows to do the same thing. Repeatedly.
Who am I to pour scorn on being able to make a career out of nothing at all? Hopefully, Stranger Things will show up soon and everything will be just fine in the small hours of the morning...
Anyway, I booked a flight to Bucharest this morning - I'm heading out to a show there that will be good fun. I hear they like books over there and have quite a reading culture. I'm hoping to find something that looks like this as I wander the streets in the morning sun with a coffee in hand...
This would be a great thing to see on the streets over here. One day...
Meanwhile, in my own writing world, there is news:
Sometime during early October, the Bad Hare store here will be closing as I move my wares lock, stock and two smoking barrels over to a different publishing house. I'm still ironing out some of the finer details regarding limited edition hardbacks I want to publish in the future but it's not a difficult ironing out type of thing - just a small matter of admin. It's a fine move as I get to keep designing my own covers but also get to pass on all of the behind the scenes stuff that's dull as hell.
That's about as much as I can say about it right now - so maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all but it's out there now and I can't take it back.
I was thinking yesterday that by the end of the year, I want to leave some of the social media places I appear to have locked myself into. I’m not seeing a lot of mileage in Twitter anymore given that I can type more words over at Instagram but then again, writers don't hang out much on Instagram. Then again, writers are not necessarily readers and I have sold more books (and bear t-shirts) from being active on Instagram than I have on Twitter by quite some measure. Then again, instagram is owned by Facebook - who I despise even though I have trialled some posting there recently and found it to be remarkably 'OK'.
Hmmm.
The best answer is to walk away from all of them and play nowhere but in my own house right here, but then... nobody knows what the hell you’re doing and you can find yourself stuck in the hell of your own quicksand before you know it. Unless of course, you can get yourself on the news, have enough cash to install some posters on the London Underground or... man, I don’t know... What would Henry Rollins do?
Damn... even he plays with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts to keep people clued in. You can’t rely on fucking anything anymore.